Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, a method for controlling the printing apparatus, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
A printing apparatus performs print processing on a sheet by using a recording material such as toner and ink. The recording material such as toner and ink is stored in a storage unit called a cartridge. The printing apparatus detects the remaining amount of the recording material stored in the storage unit, and displays the detected remaining amount on a display unit. When the remaining amount of the recording material decreases down to a predetermined threshold value or below, the printing apparatus further notifies a user of the decreased remaining amount of the recording material.
In many cases, the printing apparatus can only roughly detect the toner remaining amount. More specifically, the printing apparatus can only correctly detect limited toner remaining amounts such as 0%, 20%, and 50%. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-343621 discusses a method for correcting detectable remaining amounts in such a printing apparatus. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-343621 discusses a technique for predicting the toner remaining amount after completion of printing, by calculating the toner consumption amount based on the dot count value of print data and then subtracting the calculated toner consumption amount from the toner remaining amount. The use of the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-343621 enables even a printing apparatus capable only of roughly detecting the toner remaining amount to predict the toner remaining amount and notify a user of the detailed toner remaining amount.
When the toner remaining amount has decreased down to a certain amount, the printing apparatus notifies the user of toner LOW indicating the decreased toner remaining amount. Meanwhile, there is a user demand for freely changing a threshold value as a reference value for making a toner LOW notification. For example, when the toner remaining amount is about 10%, a certain user does not replace the toner cartridge immediately after the user is notified of toner LOW. Such a user desires to change the toner LOW threshold value to a smaller value.
However, in the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-343621, a predicted value is used to detect the toner remaining amount, hence there may be a large difference between the predicted toner remaining amount and the actual toner remaining amount. For example, there is a case where the actual toner remaining amount considerably decreases before the predicted toner remaining amount decreases down to a threshold value set by the user. In such a case, a printing failure not intended by the user occurs, for example, printed characters may become faded although the user is not notified of toner LOW.
On the other hand, if the user is not allowed to set the threshold value at all, the above-described demand is not satisfied.